Tom Valenti

North of Ouest

For a such a passionate fan of great cuisine and the people who are responsible
for creating it, somehow the concept of watching cooking shows on television
has just never appealed to me. Perhaps you could say I’m TV-chef challenged,
because honestly, watching some of those shows falls just a few remote-clicks
away from my all-time favorite, C-Span, when I desperately need a cure for
insomnia. With all due respect to some of the very talented restaurant-trained
chefs who look terrific on TV, you still can’t smell the food, tasting
it is out of the question, and unless you have a photographic memory or can
take dictation at 200 words a minute, forget about ever duplicating that fab
dish you just saw on your 25-inch screen.

But perhaps there is hope for me in Chef-TV land. If Anthony Bourdain ever
gets tired of traveling around foreign lands talking to the camera about local
customs and food, he’d be a terribly entertaining TV chef. He’s
funny and intelligent and he can also cook, but since his humor is perhaps
a bit too extreme for the Food Network or PBS, my hope is that the R-rated
HBO network will step in and make him an offer. I could also name a half-dozen
chef’s I’ve met who would be entertaining enough on the tube to
give even a tough TV-chef critic like myself reason to tune in. But what if
you could find a chef who created one of New York’s most successful family
relief funds, who has been at the top of the Manhattan culinary class for nearly
20 years, is as knowledgeable about food as anyone on the planet, and who not
only looks like George Carlin but is nearly as funny? It sounds like TV-chef
heaven.

Tom Valenti is someone that is universally admired in his profession, and not
just for his cooking talent and his incredible string of successful restaurants.
His upper-west side restaurant Ouest runs perfectly without him for days at
a time, a tribute to his coaching and team-building skills, and to the respect
that his staff have for him. This success has provided him with the freedom
to regularly escape the stress of Manhattan for the solitude and beauty of
his riverside cottage in the Catskills. Tom Valenti is someone who cooks to
live, a star chef whose heart begins beating as he crosses the George Washington
Bridge at the onset of a spring or early summer weekend - especially if the
flies are hatching on the Beaverkill or Delaware rivers that are his second
home.

Watching Valenti working in Ouest’s kitchen, where he usually starts
his day at 8 in the morning, he seems a natural at everything he does. He slices
and chops with the careful precision of an artist, yet he’s playful and
cracks jokes while directing his staff with the ease of someone who has done
it a million times. He’s clearly perfected his craft and can enjoy himself
with his staff, and seems more like a cool homeroom teacher than the chef/owner
of an acclaimed Manhattan restaurant.

Valenti loved to cook at an early age, and when he graduated high school, he
found one of his first significant cooking jobs the old fashioned way – his
girlfriend talked him into it. “In the late 70’s, I was dating
a girl who had just graduated from Ithica College. She was from Westchester,
and when she left she wanted me to come live there. She found an ad in the
newspaper for a private chef in Westchester County, called on my behalf, and
stuck the phone in my face. I spoke to the guy, went on to interview with him,
and we hit if off.”

Valenti got the job, and he began cooking for his new boss and his wife, who
were extremely knowledgeable about food and wine, five days a week. He was
allowed to be creative and basically cook whatever he wanted, with one caveat;
he wasn’t allowed to repeat any dish for 200 days. “So if I made
pasta fazool in May,” explained Valenti, “I couldn’t make
it again until September. So I’d wake up in the middle of the night with
cold sweats: ‘What am I going to make now!’ But it gave me a great
platform to just screw up, and experiment.” The job ended two years later
when the couple divorced, and as Tom likes to tell his friends, “no one
sued for custody of the chef.” His next job was in a small restaurant
in Nyack in 1980, L’arc De Provence, where he would experience his first
taste of a New York restaurant review.

“I remember the one review that I got when I was there. Boy did they
set me up! They came in, they took my picture – this was back when we
had these big chef hats - and I’m smiling; so here’s my picture
in this local newspaper, and the title read “L’arc’s no Lark,” and
they proceeded to trash us. They eviscerated the restaurant, and me not knowing
about this, I was like, ‘oh you mean people actually write about food?
And they put it in the paper? Ok, whatever.’ I hadn’t a clue. That
was quite a lesson.”

Valenti recovered from the Nyack review and eventually got his first break
by beginning a long working relationship with Guy Savoy, first in the U.S.,
then in Paris. When Savoy asked Valenti to come back to the States and help
open a restaurant in Greenwich, he worked mainly in the kitchen, but he was
also asked to spend some time at the front of the house. Here, he had to adjust
his personality a bit. Whereas in the kitchen his taste buds and his sense
of humor were an asset, he found that on the carpeted side of the restaurant
he had to bite his tongue on occasion.

“One day at lunch there were two women sitting at a table, and one of
the women was smoking a cigarette. The food came and she just kept smoking
away. Then the first thing she did was to grab the saltshaker and do this (shaking
motion). She put her cigarette out, took a bite, then she called me over and
said, ‘This food is too salty.’ And I felt like smacking her! But
you only say “Yes ma’am,” and you take it away. You can’t
say, ‘you crack-ho, you should have tasted the food first.’ But,
it was one of those lessons of restraint, like in my later years where I learned
to give the customer what they want. I had many tantrums as a chef in the back
of the house for many years saying, ‘I refuse to do that, I am not going
to serve it with the sauce, I am not going to substitute it with this,’ because
that’s my creative thing. Well bullshit, basically what it comes down
to is; if you want that customer to pay for what they consumed so you can pay
your staff, you’d better shut up and give them what they want. That was
the last thing that I took away from working in the front of the house. When
I opened here (at Ouest), we had all these composed dishes, but we also had
a simple grill section. You can get a simply grilled piece of chicken or a
simply grilled steak, or you can order a side of sautéed spinach or
green beans or whatever you want. So, that was a very valuable lesson.”

Valenti took all the lessons he learned from working for Savoy and applied
them in his first high-profile chef job, at Gotham Bar and Grill under new
executive chef Alfred Portale. He met Portale in a chance encounter at Charles
de Gaulle airport when he his friend Daniel Johannes introduced them. They
sat beside each other on the plane, and after several more chance encounters
back in New York, “I convinced him to hire me as his first sous chef
at The Gotham,” Valenti says about Portale. After some wonderful press,
including a glowing article from Gael Green and a three-star review from Bryan
Miller of the New York Times, the phones started ringing at Gotham, and they
haven’t really stopped.

“Alfred and I started together when Gotham was not doing well, and he
revived the place. The restaurant was doing maybe 50 or 60 covers when we started
there and through his hard work he got a lot of attention from the New York
press. When we found out that we got 3 stars, I remember him walking down the
stairs of the kitchen with his eyes wide open and his head slightly shaking
like, ‘okay well we’re like a dog chasing a car, now we have got
the car, what do we do with it?’

By the time he left Gotham Bar and Grill in 1987, Valenti was ready to run
his own high-profile kitchen, and he got his chance with Alison on Dominick.
The reviews and awards soon began to roll in; Esquires’s “Best
New Restaurant in New York City” in 1989; Food and Wine magazine’s “Ten
Best New Chefs” in 1990, among others. Yet in the midst of all this success,
he was always planning for his future, and he soon found it in the foothills
of the Catskills in 1991.

“I saw the property, found out how many acres it was on and how much
riverfront there was, and brought it, despite the ranting of many locals who
said you really shouldn’t buy the property because the house was off-kilter.
It was built on piers and what happened was, they built the house and they
never poured footings - it’s the Catskills! So over the years the house
started to pitch forward toward the river, because of all the seepage and natural
springs. But I figured that for the price, if I can save the cabin, fine, and
if not I’ll just knock it down. So I found a builder who came down and
put hydraulic jacks under the house and lifted it up, poured footings, rebuilt
the piers, and they set the house back down again and that was it. Then we
put a big deck on it.”

Valenti apparently had an equally adept eye for selecting country properties
as he did for selecting new restaurants to hone his culinary skills. After
Ruth Reichl became a big fan of Valenti in the 1990’s (calling him “A
clairvoyant in the kitchen” for his ability to repeatedly create dishes
that people craved), his success at restaurants like Cascabel and Butterfield
81 finally led him to the restaurant that he now calls home, Ouest on the upper
west side. The converted dry cleaner and coffee shop that Valenti opened in
the spring of 2001 became an instant destination for those who craved his slow-cooked
style of delicious, working-the-stove-all-weekend dishes.

But in September of that year, all of this spare time was diverted from trips
to his summer cottage to an organization he began with some friends in order
to help the families affected by the collapse of the Twin Towers. The charity
was not only for the families of the Windows of the World restaurant workers
who were in the building at the time of the terrorist attack, but the families
of ALL food workers affected within the two buildings. The organization, called
Windows of Hope, became well-known not only for providing instant financial
relief to the families who needed it quickly, but it also became a model for
other non-profit groups that would soon follow. And it all started with a phone
call.

“I called Mario and I called Bobby, and I called Alfred and I called
Charlie and I called Daniel – you know I literally was rubbing the skin
off of my ears by day 2 or 3. So, to relieve myself, when I called Terrance
I said do me a favor, call Brad at the River Café, call this one and
call that one and tell them to call 3 people that they know. And make sure
that those three people that they know tell three friends and so on and so
on. It got to a point that after a couple of days, I was still making phone
calls - I mean morning, noon, and night.”

Ultimately they raised over $23 million, and because it was an emergency situation
they decided to start distributing money almost immediately, without really
knowing how much money was coming in. “In the month or so that followed,
when we were getting donation money through the mail, there was the Anthrax
scare. So, we had piles and bags of checks that we couldn’t process because
nobody wanted to open the envelopes. When that scare went away, and we resumed
and made an initial distribution, all of a sudden the money really started
rolling in. so, we made another distribution and then another. We ended up
distributing roughly $12 or $13 million within 18 months. The money was given
to the families for whatever they needed. Rent, fix the roof, books for the
kids, whatever. The other two parts of the mission statement was that we committed
to - and have fulfilled - five years of health insurance for every family member.” Money
was also allotted to family members for educational purposes, but not only
for the children - also for newly widowed parents who might need English as
a second language training, secretarial school, or whatever training they needed
to care for their families. Recently, after Hurricane Katrina, Bill Shore from “Share
Our Strength” called Valenti asking for help in setting up a national
dine-out similar to the one that Windows of Hope had done so successfully four
years prior, on October 11, 2001. The result was the successful “Restaurants
for Relief”, and Share Our Strength is planning their second annual national
fund-raising event this coming August 29th.

Valenti opened his second restaurant in September of 2003, called Cesca’.
A mere five minute walk from Ouest, Cesca’ instantly became the area’s
hottest restaurant. But recently it was announced that Valenti would not be
associated with that particular restaurant any more. “It was sad to see
it end. Cesca’ was about my Italian heritage of cooking vs. my French
training which is represented here at Ouest, and it was well received. I think
the upper west side still could use a couple more good restaurants. It wasn’t
terribly long after Cesca’ opened that my partners approached me about
another project, Cesca’ in Atlantic City. I didn’t want to do it
because I really was the only operating partner onsite at both restaurants.
So I felt it was important to attend to the home fires as opposed to driving
three and a half hours and taking time away from these babies, especially with
Cesca’ being so young.”

Valenti resisted the idea of opening the Atlantic City outpost with his name
on it, and eventually this project brought Valenti to a crossroads with his
financial partners. Valenti offered to buy his partners out of both restaurants,
but eventually he decided to keep Ouest and let Cesca’ go. Meanwhile,
Cesca’ Atlantic City opened in February of 2005 and closed last November,
after only nine months in operation.

One thing that Valenti has not resisted is the idea of publishing cookbooks.
During the two years leading up to Cesca’ New York’s opening, he
wrote and published two cookbooks, “Welcome to my Kitchen” in 2003
and “Tom Valenti’s Soups, Stews, & One-Pot Meals” in
2003. The follow-up book for Valenti, a diabetic, will be a healthful approach
to cooking that is diabetic sensitive, which means that “anybody can
cook from the book and everybody can eat from the book because not everybody
has diabetes,” Valenti explains. “But, if you are going to have
a dinner party and there happens to be one person there who is diabetic it’s
not like everybody else is going to suffer.”

But work on the new book likely won’t begin until Valenti is sure the
fish have stopped biting. But the time of year this drastic occasion occurs
can be vastly different, depending on whom you ask. This summer’s heavy
flooding that devastated many Catskill-area homes (but spared Valenti’s)
has also made fishing more difficult for avid fly fishermen. But even when
he is successful, he releases every wild trout he catches back into the river.

“I’ve got brown trout that are 2 feet long that are wild, and I’ve
also caught brook trout that were this big (holding his hands apart), that
were the most brilliant jewel-like things you could ever imagine seeing. The
bigger fish have all been caught and released. So, it’s not that they
are smart, but their intuitive sense of natural food is very strong. So, when
they get hooked a couple of times, they become more aware. So, consequently
the bigger ones are harder and harder to catch - yes their little fins come
up and they go ‘Oh, who are you fooling!’”

When Valenti needs trout at his Manhattan restaurant, he’ll order them
from a trout farm, his favorite being Edenbrook Fish Market in Monticello (845-791-4423).

“There are a lot of times when the fish aren’t feeding, so you
sit on the bank and you learn about wild flowers, and you learn about trees.
And you just breathe deeper than you do when you are in the city.”

Finally, we got to fish! Tom went into the water first, and I followed, carrying
his “backup” pole he had graciously allowed me to use. It had been
a while....ten years?.... since I had held a fly rod, so I found myself a secluded
corner of peaceful water far enough away from Tom so I wouldn’t distract
the fish he was hoping to start a relationship with. By the time I remembered
how to pull line off the reel, letting the thick hollow string unwind long
enough so I can begin the process of re-learning how to make a difficult fly
cast, I looked to my right saw that Tom was already into it. He seemed to be
toying with the underwater creatures, his line driving forward and then back
again in repeated 50 to 60 foot-long curls of poetic motion. The fly’s
feathers were being dried from being whipped around in the air, yearning to
land yet never quite managing to reach the water. Finally Tom relented and
let it down, and the fly seemed to float magically, half an inch above the
bubbling water surface. If the cast is done correctly, and Tom’s cast
is, the fly will move with the water and not with the line, creating the perfect
imitation of a floating trout delicacy. I go back to my casting, realizing
that my casts will never be that perfect.

Suddenly I heard movement, and I see that Tom has put down his pole on a small
island and he’s busy turning over rocks in the shallow area of the river.
When I came up alongside him he showed me the bottom of one, and explained
that he was looking for fly hatches. If he found one, he’d try to match
his fly to the color of the hatch that was happening at that particular moment.
He finally found one - a miniscule white grub that, when he showed me I could
barely see - and excitedly tells me the name of it while beginning to search
for a matching white fly in his little fly box. While he stood in the water
tying on the new offering, this temporary break in the action allowed me enough
time to really look around me, and take in the landscape that Tom has chosen
to surround himself with for the past 15 years. As I felt the cold water rushing
around my feet and legs, I realized that the powerful vision of the Catskill
Mountains makes it impossible to think about anything else.

I saw Tom wade downstream after a feeding fish, and decided to put my rod down
and watch the show.